Navigating the Cloud: Sourcing Modern Applications for Business Growth
8/22/2024 | nmb@konfitech.com
In our last blog post we talked about how you can improve operations and innovation by modernizing applications and development techniques around that. Today, we would like to talk about sourcing modern applications and how to source these applications in this new modern cloud world.
Applications built in the cloud have reached a point of maturity and readiness for commercial adoption. However, just because many of the newest applications out there have buzzwords such as SAAS, Cloud, Subscription payment, you still need to make careful evaluations when sourcing these modern applications before you make the purchase.
However, this SAAS application model has its benefits. A modern application offered to enterprises can give them back the speed of a small company. Given the nature of its cloud-based model, with less up-front investments, ease of deployments, and ease of user experience. If your company also has significant leverage or potentially built the application internally you will also have a huge say on roadmaps and features to be added, which can be added at a rapid pace when sourcing modern solutions.
SAAS is evolving in many areas, however their burst out to the scene has given them much less time to mature in specific functional areas as traditional applications. There is usually a functionality gap between some of the bigger monolithic applications businesses have traditionally run on. Areas which generally need the same functionalities in all industries such as Sales, HR, and marketing have already well established SAAS and modern application solutions. Unfortunately, more industry-specific functional areas that need more adaptability such as supply chain or data analysis are somewhat immature for most industries and need a lot of work to be adapted unlike the out-of-the-box SAAS solutions. Hence, your strategy in sourcing modern applications must be carefully evaluated.
This means that at least for a while forward many need deployment in a hybrid model, considering that the new model will be the better choice for the future, but they will still need some of the legacy infrastructure due to capabilities not being available in the cloud yet. Combining on-premises infrastructure and applications and cloud-based applications needs a significant amount of planning and consideration. For example, figure out the requirements of business outcomes, cloud strategy, what workloads can be moved, and what makes sense to move. Ensuring you are effectively sourcing the modern applications required is crucial.
The most important elements to consider when building a business case for moving a workload or modernizing an app are two things:
- The application fulfills one or more business needs.
- The move to a cloud-based application has potential for ROI.
If neither of these two are fulfilled the move is currently pointless and will likely only increase the costs of operating.
A tip here is often to look for the more mature applications; time in the market for modern applications and SAAS can be an indication of quality. Meaning that those who have had the longest time to iterate on client needs are usually better in their market, making them a better choice when you're sourcing modern applications.
Older and bigger SAAS players also offer more breadth and depth of their services. Giving you the potential option to consolidate the supplier side of sourcing for the deal. This can lower costs and overhead related to acquiring and operating the software. Often making the business case much better. However, it also increases the one-vendor risk when sourcing modern applications.
Because you are transferring significant amounts of data into the cloud, there are cybersecurity risks related to SAAS applications. Generally, these are vital areas of importance to SAAS because it is a weakness in their model. They do offer remedies like web gateways, follow security and encryption standards etc. Again, here age can be a quality sign. However, these security requirements can add to the price, so make sure that you also classify the significant information risk that is associated with the data you want to store in the SAAS and find a vendor that has appropriate security in relation to the informational risk. Since in cloud economics demand for service and price needs to balance out to be optimized for you. This delicate balance underscores the importance of carefully sourcing modern applications.
The flow of capital into the SAAS market and the new addition of AI being built into these applications is interesting to follow. As it seems like there are more and more silos being built. The benefit will come to those who are open for intractability and build great APIs for collaborative purposes, making it easy to connect other pieces together for a composable application. A great example of this is the note-taking tool https://www.notion.so/ who are fully focused on integrations and intractability.
Making the wrong choice on SAAS that interacts with each other poorly will force you to build API management gateways that need to be managed, and appropriately configured based on the formats the API providers have on their SAAS application. Hence, sourcing modern applications with a keen eye on compatibility is key to avoid these issues.
If you want to discuss more on how you can have a cloud-first mindset when looking for applications or building a new one, feel free to reach out to us: https://www.konfitech.com/contact-us
We are also super happy to discuss other possibilities of working with you to source or build better applications, infrastructure, or modernizing of your business. We are cloud-first and love to build applications by sourcing modern technologies.
https://konfitech.com/insights/how-to-do-a-digital-transformation-and-innovate-with-a-modern-application-platform/